Year-round Yuletide oddities

Monthly Archives: April 2017

After feasting on sweet stuff for a month, we have to deal with the consequences.

HPU nursing has an informational talent show (no winners, sorry) in “The Diabetes Song (The Christmas Song)” set to ‘Chestnuts Roasting.’ It’s a real downer, but full of helpful info about how not to die in this condition.

Stuckey and Murray have an angrier song “Santa Gave Me Diabetes,” which while fun folk rock AND based on a true story, still poops on your corn flakes with its cautionary tale of profligate sweet-eating. Take that, fun.

Gingerbread is not just a cookie! Richard Graham explores the architectural possibilities for the holidays with “Gingerbread House” a singing tutorial. What’s the kiddies’ mortgage on that playful dough?

Fudge can be overlooked for weeks on the great Advent platter and still be just as good! This number comes with a long spoken exposition, like those end-of-the-world movies. It’s a folk epic about a dead grandmother’s gift. “The Christmas Fudge” may haunt you, or you can skip it.

Leslie Adams screams “No Fudge for Christmas” meaning no treats of any kind in a house gone healthy. A fun song concept, but the voice changer was cranked up to whiny so… yeah.

Bonnie Legion brings us back to cookies, but this time they’re alive! Don’t bite them! Aiee! Wait–is that early Twentieth Century jazz/ragtime?! What a great “Christmas Cookie Song” almost ruined with video-making and special effects.

Rap loves to infantilize with its pacifiers, saggy britches, and flaunted hedonism, so here’s a rash of hip hop Xmas ladyfingers: Wazo and The Elf achieve a lovely balance of kids’ song and dub step with “Santa’s Chewing on My Cookies.” This needs to be on a Disney album for pre-teens, stat. Suburban family style rap from Accordian Hank and Jonny V cuts up “Hot Christmas Cookies” with more bounce and modulated fun than it should. It’s Glee-ful. Buckwheat Boyz run a bit OG with “Milk and Cookies.” The G is for general audiences; this is family fun.

Playing on the Motown emotions Mr. Phill Wade may not mean “Milk and Cookies” like the other songs mean. This may be R-rated if you listen too carefully, despite the oblique Christmas reference. Make him wait ’til you’re ready, girl! Another branch of Motown RuPaul doo wops “Christmas Cookies” from her lovin’ oven. It’s just as suggestive. Not ’til you’re ready, boys!

If you unscrew that Oreo you’ll find the overweight folk of Keith Mendelsohn’s “Christmas Cookies.” The man can noodle out a warm aroma with his twinkling words.

Lady-style, Amanda Duncan leads the girl-troupe with “Christmas Cookies” like the Andrew Sisters. It’s old fashioned but attractive, in a sexy gramma way.

As usual we’re leading to rock. All musical styling leads to rock. So let’s end up with rockabilly. The Rockin Elfs bubomp “Christmas Cookies” with a little too much kid slant and enumeration. Spine bending ‘billy comes from G Love with his “Christmas Cookies.” This, fittingly revues all the sweets of this past month into one danceable carol. Swing those bars!

Laissez les bon temps roulez with a zydeco spin as “Santa Stole My Christmas Cookies” steals your feet further and Travis Matte reminds you why cajuns rock the house up on stilts (cuz of the swamp) more than elvisinators.

Nora Yockey retros a ’90s girl beat with a pop ’60s feel for her “Christmas Cookies.” A bit underdone but still edible.

Vaporous True doubles down on the girl group sound with electronica harmony by way of “Christmas and Cookies Song.” There’s a sadness here that feels foreign. (Maybe that’s just angst about whether or not they’ll get a pony.)

Musicals need shorthand to describe an idea. Christmas cookies fill the bill as a little detail with a big tradition to unpack.

Henry Noodle is a small time musical franchise by Tim McCanna. He’s pursued musical theater through the Cosmic Calamities of his SciFi hero. One such adventure saw our hero teaching silly girl aliens in skimpy costumes about Christmas. “Christmas Cookies” takes a minute to start, but becomes crispy and crunchy in its own special echelon.

Tina deVaron spreads her own show stopping message (and jazz hands) with “When is a Cookie?” Trust me, it’s a holiday song. And it’s got close up mugging, sashaying, and the drama of a torn family. Oh, and a recipe.

The Fairy Tale Pops is the 21st century version of sweatshop kids’ music. They crank out albums into dollar bins based on fairy tales Disney made movies out of but don’t own the Grimms’ copyrights to.

I don’t mean to malign their talent, verve, or business acumen (although their fan site has “0 fans” as of this writing). I think this flashy, percussive, bubblegum is just as good for children as Mozart in the womb. It has a formative place in human development.

I say all this because they have a complete album devoted to a particular Christmas cookie: The Gingerbread Man’s Christmas.

Featured tunes include the swinging pop “Gingerbread Man, Gingerbread Man” set to ‘Silent Night,’ a sassy ersatz-rock “The Chase,” and sweet harmony country style “Sweet and Tasty Pastry.” Set to ‘Up on the Housetop’ “The Great Christmas Eve Cookie Calamity” sets the whole story up, however, with vertiginous rhythms and electronic orchestrations out of science fiction.

Not that cookies are more kid-friendly than candy canes, but the pedantic Christmas chants for little brains add too much sugar and not enough spice. So here are our nominees for most over-enunciated, staccato syncopated, simply loud songs about cookies for Christmas.

Slinging an agenda to the ankle-biters Cherry, the Resurrection Rabbit (unironically) sings “Christmas Cookies” in an undecipherable falsetto about cookies, Christ, and Easter. Huh?

More funny speech impediments from Patrick Roberage Productions, Inc. swinging the kids with the whiny complaints of crappy cookie making in “Christmas Cookie Jam.” Slap that grandma.

Playing the Goofy card Brent Holmes sings “The Christmoose Cookie Song” like a moose, though not a religious one. Moose are stupid and make kids laugh at them, in case you weren’t sure.

Silly hillbilly music makes kids kid like, i guess. Crime and dogs, banjos and harmonicas, John R Erickson romps and rollocks through “Christmas Cookies.” And if you learn about the history of American music in the mix, well fine.

Nothing like a military march to rouse the tots into cookie singing formations! This one seems like Plank Road Publishing (a hothouse of school assembly song production), but i don’t have a source. “Christmas Cookies” here features a fast and a slow side with a point counter point round for the finale. All i really hear are exhausted first grade teachers.

What kid songs can do is cough up a big production show tune like the renaissance of Disney musicals did back in the ’90s. Veggie Tales wants kids proselytized to Christianity with singing produce and a dash of wit, a dollop of talent, and I must say some delirium. “Oh Santa” features an anxious boy cucumber with a plate of Christmas cookies, three wisemen (asparagus burglar, pea viking with an odd trace of Hebrew, squash IRS auditor), cheap sets, samaritan examples, slapstick, and a bellicose tomato Santa. Take a peek:

The hoary tradition of the plateful of cookies by the chimney is only enhanced by everyone eating the special made spritz and platzchen hand over hand until the holidays are past. Oh, whew, let me catch my breath.

The monster novelty (read mainstream) Christmas songs here are:

“Christmas Cookies” by George Strait and everyone else in the entire country music hemisphere who wants an aw shucks gee whiz addition to their yule oeuvre. It’s cute. All those other covers basically ape George. The only variations i like for their variety are the R W Hampton (and kids) batch for adding just a pinch of honky tonk, and the Hadley Holloway and Gregory Fisher half-dozen for their swing/early rock joy.

“‘Til Santa’s Gone (Milk & Cookies)” by Clint Black. This one doesn’t have the legs of the the 1990s Strait classic, but it gets down home and five-years-old and tells a story. It twerks country music the wrong way, overusing the choochoo harmonica, formatted after the musical show-stopper, but gee-golly does it bake for me.

12Stone Worship offers up Xian young men of the hiphop persuasion to praise the Christmastide, while side slamming our target with “Spread Love, Not the Fruitcake.” Fresh (yeah, without the exclamation point, tha’s wha-yime-sighin’). Big mixedmedia finish, though.

I’ve already squiched in Lauren Mayer’s “The Fruitcake That Ate New Jersey.” That was more than a year ago, so another song-story-time for this overbaked orchestration.

Pretty as twinkling lights is 1000 Clowns mellowly rapping “I Hate Fruitcake” available from all i can tell only on the KROQ Christmas fund-raiser. I don’t begrudge the boys hate when they sing like angels who were high.

The sticky crumbs here… angry, mean songs about fruitcake with some redeeming graces.

Some old schoolhouse rock ripoff about fruitcake rounded the web a while back and at least one troller posted half of this nice calypso number (without any laffs in it) as “The Fruit Cake Song.” It had possibility….

Another “Fruitcake Song” of uncertain origin backs prepubescent pajama wearing ballerina-wannabes in some outdoor park festival. It kinds pops, what you can hear of it.

Local holiday revue with neighbor talent only embellishes “Holiday Lament (Nobody Likes a Fruitcake)” from That Time of Year. This time it’s from the point of view of the maligned mealy loaf, at least that side of the table. Great harmonies, girls!